We hope with all these changes Manjaro to be more efficient for you all.

If you are curious about the latest state of development for the upcoming Manjaro-Illyria 18.0 release, you now have the opportunity to download a beta-build of Manjaro-Xfce 18.0 including the latest xfce-gtk3 packages aswell as our most recent styling efforts:

thunar-archive-plugin has added native support for the Engrampa archive manager. engrampa-thunar-plugin is no longer needed. Remove engrampa-thunar-plugin to continue with the update.

Items from previous update sets

Kernel 4.9 issues

Seems on rare conditions you may face a faulty boot with linux49. It results in messages similar like this: <module> likely not compiled with -mcmodel=kernel. Also you will land in the emergency console.

We recommend to install at least another kernel as backup. You may follow this post to recover. v4.9.107-2 is known to be working.

I see a lot of pacnew files

Well, there is no manual intervention needed for pacnew files coming from filesystem package. The best thing you can do is, do nothing.

Never, ever, ever, ever, ever merge the pacnew file for /etc/{passwd,shadow,gshadow,group}, unless you want to make the new comments match aesthetically with your in-use user accounts database. The only practical difference that merging can ever cause is to accidentally delete users or mangle the whole file’s syntax and render your computer maybe unbootable.

Changes made to Glibc

The new version of glibc removes support for NIS and NIS+. The default /etc/nsswitch.conf file provided by filesystem package already reflects this change. Please make sure to merge pacnew file if it exists prior to upgrade.

NIS functionality can still be enabled by installing libnss_nis package. There is no replacement for NIS+ in the official repositories.

Changes made to PAM

pam 1.3.0-2 no longer ships pam_unix2 module and pam_unix_*.so compatibility symlinks. Before upgrading, review PAM configuration files in the /etc/pam.d directory and replace removed modules with pam_unix.so. Users of pam_unix2 should also reset their passwords after such change. Defaults provided by pambase package do not need any modifications.

Check grep -rn 'pam_unix[2_]' /etc/pam.d, if no output, you need to do nothing.

Samba units renamed

Note: In samba 4.8.0-1, the units were renamed from smbd.service and nmbd.service to smb.service and nmb.service.

To provide basic file sharing through SMB start/enable smb.service and/or nmb.service services. See the smbd(8) and nmbd(8) man pages for details, as the nmb.service service may not always be required.

Directory permissions differ

Currently there seems to be an issue when using group = sambashare with Samba 4.8.1-1, which is used by default in thesmb.conf provided by Manjaro. Changing it to group = +sambashare or force group = +sambashare resolves this. However, we might fill out a bug report, to see why that is currently needed.

Commenting/removing group = sambashare is also a viable solution.

Long delay for starting Desktop Environment

There’s a bug which is exhausting the entropy pool. This is refilled over time through e.g. disk activity and mouse movement. You can increase the fill rate with a software solution:

​Distros,
We’re getting numerous reports of two major problems with 5.13.1
Please hold off on any roll outs. Will update when I have more info/fixes.
Sorry
David
https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/release-team/2018-June/010988.html
Known bugs:
Two issues were:
Complete crash on startup. Seems to be with Qt < 5.11 so Arch is fine
Some relatively minor issue with the touchpad KCM not loading
We’ll have a 5.13.1.1 of plasma-desktop coming today which addresses both.
David
https://mail.k…

With Plasma 5.13.1, the theme problem with big icons in plasma-nm are gone and all seems really nice now.
I have two other issues that are a deal breaker for me, at least for Plasma to be in the stable branch.

The system tray bug that makes the system tray act weird (not opening some of the applets, not closing properly etc). Just open “system tray settings”, click on “Entries” and there you have it (no need for “ok” or “apply”). Reproducible every time on 5 different PC’s. (tested on Manjaro KDE and Neon, the same effect). Solution: restart plasmashell

The “folder view” widget in the panel got messed up and the contents are unreadable (only 6 characters from the line and snows only one entry with scroll bar). Before that it was a perfect list with all entries, readable and without a scroll bar). I’ve tried different themes (breeze light|dark and arc themes) to check if maybe it’s theme related. The problem is a show stopper for me. But I can test this only on my machine. If someone else can check this and confirm it, that would be nice.

I would say that Plasma is good to go to stable when these fixes are in.

The system tray bug that makes the system tray act weird (not opening some of the applets, not closing properly etc). Just open “system tray settings”, click on “Entries” and there you have it (no need for “ok” or “apply”). Reproducible every time on 5 different PC’s. (tested on Manjaro KDE and Neon, the same effect). Solution: restart plasmashell

I spoke too soon. I tried again, and the entries are all gone. Also, I just clicked on the Networks icon in the system tray, and the list of hidden entries appeared. The same thing happens if I click on the volume or clipboard icon now. Only since I went into the Entries setting in the System Tray Settings.